Art is a dialogue with Time. Of course, this may take different forms, so that to compare by contrasting one kind of art with another is not an entirely useless operation. It is in this sense that I should like to speak of the artistic world of women, of women’s poetry and its place in contemporary Russia.
In 2001 and 2002, the Tretyakov Gallery mounted several major retrospective exhibitions of Russian women’s painting. One of these was called “Amazons of the Avant-garde” and was dedicated to Olga Rozanova and Natalya Goncharova; there were also individual retrospectives. Among others, I remember an exhibition entitled “Art of the Female Kind,” but the curators insisted that the title alluded not to gender, but rather to women as a tribe, a kind of separate nationality, existing side by side with the tribe of men and producing its own art. The exhibition was comprehensive and was organized chronologically. It began with artistic productions of the royal needle-workers of the sixteenth century and ended in the huge hall where twentieth-century Russian women artists, of the 70s and 80s, were represented: Irina Nakhova, Rimma Gerlovina, and others who had burst upon the Russian art-scene of the 90s, such as Olga Chernyshova, Tatyana Liberman, and Ira Waldron.
What the history of art reveals, what—from a local point of view—is becoming obvious, even in the cursory overview afforded by such an exhibition, is the total inscription of women in the male world, their auxiliary or decorative role in the world of Russian art. At least that is how it appeared prior to the Russian avant-garde. Women lacked a distinct graphic language of their own. They adhered to the canons and the stylistic norms of the epoch: Karl Briulov’s manner or the academic style, Russian impressionism or Russian modernism, followed by the Stalinist art-deco of the 30s and the Soviet romanticism of the 70s.
If we were to depict these developments, say, in animated-cartoon form, this is how it would look. Women are not permitted to paint religious or secular pictures, so all that is left for them to do is to embroider. Only at the end of the eighteenth century did ladies of the nobility, amateur artists, start producing paintings. In the nineteenth century, female talent was found exclusively among aristocrats. Thus Mariya Bashkirtseva appeared on the scene as unexpectedly as a pearl on the ocean floor. The flood of names—and the first serious attempts by women to develop their own artistic language—occurs at the beginning of the twentieth century. The invincible Natalya Goncharova may be the first Russian woman artist ready to compete with men, with her own utterly authentic, powerful, and convincing language. Marina Tsvetaeva’s interest in Goncharova is that of one great artist in another, following the same path of innovation. The present explosion, resulting from the evolution of these individual languages, dates from the end of the 80s. There is scarcely a single notable woman artist imitating somebody else or making use of the aesthetic means employed by men. Women and men at the end of the twentieth century spoke quite different languages, and there are many of these.
Inevitably certain parallels with what is happening today suggest themselves. The work of the first Russian women poets of the nineteenth century, such as Karolina Pavlova and Evdokiya Rostopchina, does not transgress the boundaries of the contemporary poetic style. “I am a woman! My thinking and my inspiration should be governed by meekness and modesty.” This self-definition by Rostopchina makes it quite clear what the woman artist’s place in the world must be. It is curious that Mariya Bashkirtseva, whose diary—she was reproached in her own time for egocentrism and concentration on her inner feelings—became one of the first manifestos of Russian feminism, thought of herself primarily as an artist, not a writer. The first real efflorescence of Russian women’s poetry is associated with the “Silver Age,” and later with the Revolution and its aftermath. The principal poets, competing with men on equal terms, are still, symbolically, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva.
Not a single other poet on a par with Akhmatova or Tsvetaeva has yet emerged, perhaps because the culture and the spirit of the times which created these preeminent figures have become irretrievable. By the 30s the creativity of the Russian (Soviet) people was forced to serve ideologically correct (purely celebratory) ends. Female emancipation, coinciding with the Russian Revolution, ended in the “equality of the sexes.” The social lie forced on it is totally alien to the language of women, which is natural and spontaneous. A woman forced to remain within the officially decreed boundaries will produce vacuities or withdraw into a private world. But in poetry a socially significant voice, however paradoxically, is achieved through personal application; and women in the country named the USSR, following the lead of the men, allowed themselves to be deprived of the right of sincere self-expression. In Russia, World War II produced a totally male atmosphere and masculine literature. To women was allotted the passive role of mourners or nurses, Olga Berggolts being one exception. Eccentric, natural talent, such as that of Kseniya Nekrasova, was not taken seriously by the Union of Soviet Writers.
The end of the 50s and early 60s, the period after Joseph Stalin’s death or the era of what we call “Khrushchev’s Thaw” (with space travel, the virgin lands project, and so forth), is in fact a pale copy of the revolutionary years, similarly optimistic, in a romantic spirit, about the reconstruction of the world. Russians learned to hope and also acquired three musketeers: Robert Rozhdestvensky, Andrey Voznesensky, and Evgeny Evtushenko, plus a woman, Bella Akhmadulina. To her credit, Akhmadulina has continued to write brilliantly up to the present. The isolated but resolute voices of Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Irina Ratushinskaya, Inna Lisnianskaya, Yunna Morits, Novella Matveeva, and younger writers Tatyana Bek, Olesia Nikolaeva, and Marina Kudimova have maintained and continue to maintain the high standard of Russian women’s literature. Until the end of the 80s, Elena Shvarts, Olga Sedakova, and Svetlana Kekova, poets virtually unknown to a wider public and with powerful metaphysical gifts, had a major influence.
Fortunately, poets, including women, who wrote for the “desk drawer” are now able to publish freely. But the “professional ban,” even in the relatively liberal 70s and 80s, did enormous damage to Russian culture in general and women’s poetry in particular. And this is especially true of the provinces. Only during the 90s did it become evident that major writers of the “feminine gender” were at work in these distant outposts of the former Soviet empire.
At the end of the 80s, political changes and the information explosion that accompanied these made poetry of “metametaphorism” accessible and led to the publication of conceptualist writers and the poets of the so-called Leningrad school. Nina Iskrenko became the star of the Moscow club “Poetry,” and Rea Nikonova began appearing at poetry festivals. On the threshold of the 90s effulgent personalities like Tatyana Shcherbina, Larisa Berezovchuk, Tatyana Voltskaya, and Inna Kabysh began to emerge. The atmosphere of the inevitably changing times, the open archives and publications, and acquaintance with the legacy of uncensored Russian literature nurtured a new generation of women poets who continued in the tradition of Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva. Among these are the neo-classicist Polina Barskova, the postconceptualist Mariya Stepanova, Vera Pavlova, and Aleksandra Petrova. Each is drawn to a particular tradition. Stepanova employs the entire palette of Nikolay Zabolotsky and rehabilitates the classical ballad, including its Soviet form; Vera Pavlova, heir to the conceptualists, is more a Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov in skirts than an apologist for the “eternal feminine,” as superficial critics believe. “Feminine” themes and erotic motifs are for Pavlova just the coating for occasionally more bitter pills. Aleksandra Petrova’s poetics largely derives from the OBERIU (Association for Real Art) poets, from Leonid Dobychin, and from conceptualist verse. The intertextuality of these poets is extensive, as if they had emerged with computers in their brains, permitting them to mount poems like video-clips—that is, to work with the texture of temporality in a nonlinear fashion.
Several significant female names have appeared in the Russian diaspora in Israel and America, for instance, and this concerns not only immigrants of the 70s and 80s but quite young women. New cosmopolitan poets like Linor Goralik, Elena Kostyleva, or the above-mentioned Polina Barskova and Aleksandra Petrova are not émigrés but rather individuals who have experienced life in diverse countries and who write about the reality familiar to them as Russians encountering the world. These are poems by writers who keep changing countries of domicile and therefore linguistic milieus. Their texts are contributing something new and unexpected, from a tonal and acoustic point of view, not just to women’s poetry but to Russian poetry as such. And there is a completely new generation of women poets—“the generation of twenty-year-olds”—which works in the mass media, on Internet publications, or in advertising. These poets embody media reality in their writing.
The division of poets according to gender is, of course, a theoretical notion. The actual contribution of any author is defined by the quality of his or her writing, not by gender. But physically and psychologically men and women are different, and this inevitably leads to differences on a linguistic level. It is well known that in ancient cultures there were distinct “female” languages, that is, those used by women, conversing among themselves. A woman expresses herself in all respects differently from men. The map of the post-Soviet female world is only now beginning to acquire specific features, and the world of women—not just of Russian women—is now in urgent need of self-definition.
Translated by Daniel Weissbort